“Come with us back to the house,” Edward urged his new mother-in-law as they were ushered toward the door, past the line of couples waiting their turn to wed. “We have friends dropping by to celebrate.”
“Neyn, nyet,” Mama stammered, first instinctively in Yiddish, then forcing herself to switch to Russian.
When laws were changed seven years earlier, mandating all Soviet children were now required to attend secular schools, Daria’s mother had overruled her husband’s edict that girls belonged at home. In their ramshackle shtetl of Valta, old men wept into their beards about all-boy, rabbi-led cheders replaced by a coed Yiddish-language school teaching Communist ideology. But that wasn’t good enough for Mama. She dragged her daughter away from her friends, whom Mama pronounced provincial, to a school in the neighboring village. Let others limit their future by clinging to Yiddish. Mama’s only child would learn Russian, and have the entire world at her feet. Mama lectured it didn’t matter if Daria’s fellow pupils were the same grubby Ukrainian hooligans who came to Valta each Easter to throw rocks and howl how zhidy killed Christian children and used their blood to bake matzoh. They were living in modern times, and Daria would be a modern woman. Stop bawling and do what your mother tells you!
As soon as Daria had absorbed an acceptable amount of Russian, Mama dictated a letter to Comrade Stalin, which Daria translated and transcribed, thanking him for this opportunity he’d granted them. Mama’s next step was pushing Daria to speak Russian without those back-of-the-tongue-rolled r’s Daria’s teacher had thoughtfully encouraged the other children to laugh at, until Daria exorcised her last telltale bit of Yiddishkeit. The same, however, did not apply to Mama. Her Russian stalled at the level of a child. Nonetheless, she refused to speak Yiddish to the worldly Gordons.
Mama demurred at their invitation to join the celebratory supper. “I do not wish to cause trouble. I must not embarrass you in front of your friends.” She ducked her head, as if her mere provincial proximity might somehow tarnish them.
“You wouldn’t embarrass us, Mama!” Daria looked to Edward and his father for support. They dutifully echoed Daria’s denial. Even as their furtive glances told her otherwise.
“Do what your husband tells you”—Mama severed the reins she’d held tightly over her daughter for seventeen years—“and everything will be well, my Daria.”
Mama had been so eager for Daria to begin her new life, she’d insisted her daughter bring her solitary travel bag to the ZAGS. Isaak Israelevitch carried it for Daria.
“Edward must protect his fingers,” he explained unnecessarily as, all around them, placards proclaimed Edward Gordon’s upcoming piano concert series at the Odessa Opera House.
It had been these posters, still wet from paste, that inspired Mama to effectuate a match between her raven-haired, ebony-eyed, voluptuous girl and the tall, dark, handsome, and accomplished Edward Gordon. They’d come to Odessa from Valta specifically to land a fellow worthy of Mama’s treasure.
Since the repeal of the New Economic Policy, NEP, allowing individuals to own small businesses, Mama pronounced the shopkeeper a man with no future. She said the same about the clerks and local government administrators who’d expressed interest in Daria. Mama knew a Jewish boy could rise only so far in politics, no matter how shrewd, ambitious, enterprising, or dynamic. Especially if they were shrewd, ambitious, enterprising, and dynamic.
“Men are to be tortured,” Mama had instructed Daria as they stood outside the opera house late one March evening, at the cross streets of Lastochkina and Lenina, across from the towering arched doorway topped by a golden balcony surrounded by two pairs of Roman columns. There was a decorative level even higher than that, framed by gold statues, the most prominent of which was a topless woman on a half shell, one arm raised in salutation, the other embracing a torch while trying to ride three panthers taking off in different directions. Two more statues, marble this time, flanked the stairs leading up to the front entrance, representing comedy, tragedy, muses, operas, and ballets. While the woman up top was half naked, the figures below were wrapped in flurries of marble cloth. Daria wondered if any of them were cold. Daria certainly was cold. March in Odessa could be windy and inhospitable to standing around this close to midnight, wearing a virginal white dress that demurely draped down to Daria’s ankles and up to her chin, yet was so tightly fitted above the waist that shivering was out of the question. She’d burst right through.
“We can’t torture Edward Gordon, Mama, if he can’t see us. He’s in there. We’re out here.”
“On the stage, he doesn’t live. He will need to exit eventually.”
Music lovers streamed out of the opera house, buttoning coats, wrapping scarves around their necks, and pulling on gloves Daria envied from afar. Mama hooked her elbow through Daria’s and pulled her around the crescent moon shape of the opera house, toward the rear exit along Teatralny Lane.
And there he was! Edward Gordon! In the flesh!
He was thinner than Daria had expected. All angles and lines, from the narrow cut of his shoulders to the jut of his elbows. His ebony eyebrows appeared drawn in, as did the two slashes of trimmed mustache below his equally symmetrical nose and cheekbones. He stood chatting with a group of admirers, half turned toward Daria. Their eyes met over the blond head of a woman who somehow managed to keep touching Edward—first on the forearm, then on the shoulder, then on the cheek, brushing off a nonexistent speck. Daria perceived that, unlike his hair, brows, and mustache, Edward’s eyes might be not black but wintergreen, a striking contrast in a face paler than the rest of his coloring. She took a step in his direction.
Edward noticed her and smiled. Daria started to smile back.
Which was when her mother gave Daria’s arm a firm tug, redirecting her trajectory away from Edward. Instead of stopping, they walked blithely past him and his entourage, Mama looking straight ahead, making it clear Daria had best do the same. They continued walking until they’d rounded the corner and were back at the front entrance, blending into the crowd of exiting citizens.
Daria threw both arms out to her sides, dress be damned. “I thought we were here to meet Edward Gordon. What are we supposed to do now?”
“Now,” her mother said, “we go home.”
Home was Moldavanka. Part suburb, part ghetto along the city’s northern rim, it was a onetime Moldovan colony that, by the turn of the century, had expanded to house nearly seventy thousand of Odessa’s poorest Jews. They came to work in factories, as laborers, as tailors, and as buyers of secondhand clothes. They stayed because laboring in factories, tailoring, and selling secondhand clothes didn’t pay much. Mama made it clear she and Daria were just passing through. Mama had no intention of settling down amid squalor that looked like a fire had recently crumbled entire blocks. They rented a room on the top floor of a house otherwise occupied by a bearded Jew who still clung to Old World nonsense, and his wife, who spent her days trying to disguise that. The room was barely large enough for the single bed it came with. They’d dragged it against the wall to give themselves a sliver of space for the chest of drawers, on top of which stood a basin to wash in. The height of the bed made opening the middle drawer impossible. If they wished to reach the one below, they had to wriggle along the floor until they lay face-to-face with the chamber pot. Their landlord asserted there was no space for a coal stove. His concession had been to sell Daria and her mother a pair of threadbare rugs they could hang on the walls to keep out the cold.